1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a hand-held, electronic apparatus which can be manually passed over a material to be copied, thereby to optically read image information printed on the material, and can be manually moved across a piece of paper, thereby to faithfully reproduce or copy the image information on the paper.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Hand-held electronic apparatuses of this type are known. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 3,767,020 to Rowe, Oct. 23, 1973 discloses a manually positionable automatic printer, which can be manually moved across a printing medium, thereby printing information on this printing medium. This automatic printer comprises a manually manipulatable housing, a wire matrix printer head, an inking ribbon, a timing signal generating means for generating timing signals as the printer is moved across the printing medium, and a control means for driving the printer head in accordance with the timing signals output from the timing signal generating means. The printer head, the ribbon, the signal generating means, and the control means are provided within the manually manipulatable housing. The housing is placed on the recording medium, with the head contacting the ribbon, which in turn contacts the recording medium. In this condition, the housing is held in a hand, and is moved across the medium. As the housing is thus moved, the signal generating means produces and supplies timing signals to the control means. In response to these signals, the printer head prints characters on the recording medium.
The manually positionable automatic printer has a drawback. Since it has a wire matrix printer head, it can hardly be made smaller and lighter, particularly when it is designed to perform a high-resolution printing.
Further, the conventional manually positionable printer is likely to print information in an uneven density or fail to print part of the information. This is because the printer head is fixed to the housing, and the contact between the head and the recording medium cannot remain in the same condition, or the pressure applied on the medium by the printer head cannot be kept constant during the image reproduction.